Travel

Japan is one of our favourite places on earth. From all the places we have visited we find Japan has the most wonderful, if not quirky, culture. The people will bend over backwards to help you, the cities are clean, everyone is polite and NO TIPPING. Zak visited Japan for the first time in August 2015. Brad and I (Steven) have been numerous times.

We are fans of observation decks in any city and we always make a point of making a trip to whatever deck we can. The Olympic Tower was not even on our radar and to our surprise was one of the best, maybe the best observation deck that we have been to.

Today is our first day in Beijing. The visibility and air quality seems to be great so we are tackling the Great Wall today. We are heading to the Mutianyu section of the Great Wall, it is the less direct route than the other section of the wall but we were told this was the place to visit. So we begin our journey this morning after chowing down a very early breakfast at 6:30am at the hotel.

Our route home from Japan included a leg from Abu Dhabi to New York (JFK) on the Etihad A380 in the Apartments. The leg is the reason why we planned this trip to Japan in the first place, we managed to get a points ticket in order to enjoy a one-of-a-kind travel experience.

Today we started our journey home to Toronto. We started from Sapporo and flew to Haneda (Tokyo) tonight. We are staying the night at Haneda and the really journey starts tomorrow. We are taking JAL Business class to Singapore, Etihad Business to Abu Dhabi, and then Etihad Apartments (First) to New York where we transfer to American airlines for our final leg. It will be an exciting adventure, and a long one.

Today we embark on a 10 day trip to Japan. What prompted this trip was an opportunity to fly home using points in the fabulous Etihad Apartments. More about that later. So building around this flight we decided to travel to parts of Japan we have yet to explore: Sapporo and Nagoya.

In order to retain status, Brad had to work in a trip that will give him enough miles to once again reach 1K status with United. Brad will be heading to Hawaii for a whopping 4 hours, turning around, and then heading back to Toronto.

In order to reach my goal of 100,000 status miles with United, I'm going to fly to Singapore for a day. It may take me 24 hours to get there and 24 hours to get home, but Business First for cheap was very tempting.

Last night we returned from a very short trip to Costa Rica. We left on Saturday and got back into Toronto on Monday night. So two full nights in Costa Rica, it was a seat sale on Copa Airlines that paid us in United status miles and for $270 CAD return, who couldn't say no?

August 18th we embark on a two week long trip to Japan. Steven, Brad, Zak and our friend Alen will be joining us. We are stopping in Chicago on the way for a day then Hiroshima, Osaka, Kyoto and ending in Tokyo.

After our great luggage loss of Janurary 2013, we were very quick to order the Trakdot luggage tracking devices when it was announced in the winter. After placing our order on March 3, five and a half months later, we have the devices in hand.

When cruising, we always like to try out the premium restaurants on board. On this cruise, we headed to Qsine on the Celebrity Millennium. The restaurant is meant to be fun and modern, you order shared dishes via iPad that are creative and presented with flair. Some hits, some misses… at $45, we expected more.